1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology for managing counter information in an image forming apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, hardware counters with a mechanical counting system have been commonly used as devices used to count service charges and various kinds of information in image forming apparatuses. The image forming apparatuses include single-function peripherals (SFP) with a function such as a printer, and multi-function peripherals (MFP) with plural functions such as a scanner and a printer. Decreasing the counted value in the hardware counter cannot easily be decreased. For this reason, hardware counters are suitable for counting service charges from a security point of view, (e.g., preventing data tampering).
Progress has been made in the use of software counters in an effort to provide more counters to improve the functionality of image forming apparatuses and to reduce cost and space savings. As in the case of hardware counters, software counters also record counted values in a storage device. The following description will refer to software counter(s) simply as counter(s). Counters are used to measure and store various kinds of usage, such as a number of execution times of an application (program) within an image forming apparatus, a number of times of operation of the image forming apparatus, and an operating time of the application. For example, a technique has been disclosed which optimally controls the number of execution times of an application by setting an upper limit to a counter used for the application, and varying the upper limit according to changes in the structure of the application (in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-129047, for example).
In a small-sized, low-cost type image forming apparatus which requires cost-cutting efforts, some image forming apparatuses adopt only a very small storage for the counters in order to reduce hardware cost. More specifically, there are two groups of image forming apparatuses: those with sufficient amounts of storage and those with very small amounts of storage. Under the conventional technology, when an application of the same type is used in the image forming apparatuses of the two groups, the counters of the same type consume memories in both apparatuses. Therefore, it is difficult to appropriately manage the memories, which are consumed by the counters of the image processing apparatuses.